Image by glenn.batuyong via FlickrHad an interesting conversation with a person via e-mail about a post I wrote about the perfect social media manager. The conversation ranged from pay, to what skills would a person need. I would be interested in hearing what others think, but in a nutshell here is my list of what I offered as advice, good, bad, ugly, in a nutshell this is what I think makes a great social media manager.

1. Be social – be willing to spend the time with people helping them over their issues, problems, concerns and kudos for the company or the product
2. Find out what is going on with your competitors, know enough to make a great argument on why your product or service is better
3. Have a thick skin, know that not everyone is going to love you, like you, some might actually loath you, the product or the service
4. Be transparent, acknowledge the good, the bad, and the downright ugly, be willing to take those issues on internally to the company to improve the product or the service
5. Be the evangelist, use and consume the product or service, get out there, talk to people, participate, follow the conversation and chime in with your opinion/viewpoint understanding that not everyone is going to agree with you
6. Get out there, be everywhere all at once, have accounts everywhere and tie them into a system like Friend Feed or something similar so that there is one place to follow everything
7. Learn to blog, tweet, and promote viewpoints, yours and others
8. Get a degree, while there is no degree in social media yet, a degree in marketing might just help here, some journalism, some video production, and some English courses will also go a long way to helping you here.
9. Be real – do not be afraid to be yourself, and don’t let your employer scare you out of being yourself
10. Know that you are going to screw up at some point where you and your employer are going to have a difference of opinion, it is important that you show the reason why you did what you did, and somehow get metrics to show that it made the company more trustworthy, or had a pay off in some manner (especially when dealing with negative issues)
11. Know who is in the business of social media, learn from them as well, social media is still so new that there are people still working out what it means, let alone how to do it. That does not mean that there are not good examples of mistakes, or good examples of successes, learn how both were accomplished, so that you have more successes and less mistakes
12. Get management buy in, come up with a plan, have a communications plan in place so that your management knows and has agreed what you will do/say/act within certain parameters, know when to get corporate buy in on a particular message, live by what you agree to internally
13. Have a social media policy and a social media plan, post it on the company’s web site so that you can point to that when your behavior gets spooky
14. Learn to tell the difference between snake oil Social Media experts and good social media experts, this is an important part of the job. There are tons of people out there that will tell you what you need to do, most of this is trivial, even this article might be trivial; three days from when it is published it might be out of date. Learn to discriminate between good and bad data, or discriminate between old and tired new and bright
15. Follow your instincts – if it feels wrong odds are likely that it is the wrong thing to do
16. Know when to back away and take a break, if you get angry or flustered, that will show through in what you are doing and cost you street cred immediately
Interested in hearing other ideas, what would you add to the list?

Tags: social, media, manager, community, ideas, ideal, social media, community manager